The New Yorker

What you're reading

The New Yorker is a weekly magazine of journalism, commentary, fiction, criticism, and cartoons, founded in 1925 by Harold Ross and now owned by Condé Nast, the Advance Publications subsidiary. It has been under editor David Remnick since 1998 and is published weekly with substantial weeks-off-the-calendar exceptions. Coverage runs from long-form investigative reporting and political commentary (Jane Mayer, Susan Glasser, Evan Osnos, Ronan Farrow, Patrick Radden Keefe) through foreign-affairs reporting, profiles, science writing, legal analysis, climate, technology and the AI industry, plus the magazine's signature literary fiction, poetry, and arts criticism.

The magazine publishes in print and digital, with a metered paywall, an active podcast operation (Politics and More, The New Yorker Radio Hour with Remnick), the daily New Yorker Today newsletter, and the New Yorker Festival annual event. The newsroom is one of the deepest long-form-journalism operations in American media, with a fact-checking department that is the institutional standard of the industry. Audience is the national college-educated, professionally engaged readership, with substantial international reach. The magazine has won the National Magazine Award for general excellence repeatedly and has driven major investigative outcomes including the Harvey Weinstein reporting that ignited the #MeToo wave.

Ownership & funding

Condé Nast / Advance Publications (private). Funded primarily through subscription + ads.

Subscription-plus-ads at New Yorker scale rewards depth and reader stickiness. The metered paywall and the high-loyalty subscriber base let the magazine support multi-month investigations, multi-thousand-word reported features, and the institutional fact-checking department that other commercial magazines have shed. Condé Nast corporate ownership concentrates strategic decisions in the parent but the magazine has operated with substantial editorial independence under Remnick, including running investigations adverse to advertisers and to Condé Nast's other interests. The trade-off is that the model depends on holding an engaged-progressive subscriber base, which reinforces the editorial identity. Print ads remain meaningful, but the digital subscription business is the strategic future.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places The New Yorker at Left with a factuality rating of High.

The Left rating reflects The New Yorker's explicit progressive editorial identity under Remnick, which the magazine does not pretend to moderate. Political coverage centers Democratic-aligned framings of national politics, with Trump-administration coverage from 2017 onward reliably critical and adversarial. The conservative legal movement, the Federalist Society, voter-suppression litigation, climate denial, and the conservative think-tank ecosystem get sustained skeptical coverage. Coverage of the Israel-Gaza war has been internally contested with multiple perspectives published but tilts toward critical analysis of Israeli policy. Foreign-affairs reporting on Russia, China, Ukraine, and the Middle East operates within a generally liberal-internationalist frame.

Where The New Yorker breaks the pattern is its willingness to publish heterodox positions and to file adverse coverage on Democratic incumbents and progressive institutions. The Hunter Biden coverage, Cuomo-administration nursing-home reporting, investigations of Democratic congressional figures, and reporting adverse to progressive nonprofits have all run. The magazine has published essays critical of progressive consensus on cancel-culture dynamics, on academic-freedom issues, and on certain identity-politics formulations. The High factuality rating reflects the fact-checking department's institutional rigor — corrections are rare and prominently flagged, anonymous sources are stood up independently, document trails are linked, and the magazine has won major libel cases against subjects of its investigations. The Left bias is in topic emphasis and framing; the factual rigor is the industry benchmark.

Editorial vs news side

The New Yorker is a magazine of long-form reporting, commentary, and criticism, and it does not pretend to have a centrist news desk separated from a progressive editorial page. The reported features are documented and fact-checked to the industry's strictest standard; the political commentary and the Comment opening essays are openly progressive. There is no separate editorial board issuing endorsements at the publication level — the magazine speaks with a unified institutional voice across reporting and commentary. The Left rating applies to the publication as a whole. What you are reading is committed progressive long-form journalism with the deepest fact-checking operation in American journalism behind it.

Why we include them in nwsly

Long-form reporting, commentary, and cultural criticism.

The New Yorker is the deepest long-form reporting operation in American magazine journalism and routinely breaks national stories that the daily-paper press picks up only after publication — the Weinstein investigation that drove #MeToo, the Mark Burnett Trump-tapes reporting, the Roy Moore investigation, sustained climate-denial-industry reporting. nwsly pulls it for the investigations and the long-form policy analysis that no other Left-rated outlet in our lineup files at the same factual rigor. The Left rating is unambiguous to readers; the perspective is legible; and the fact-checking department is the institutional gold standard, which is the reason the magazine sits at High factuality despite its declared political identity.

Recent nwsly briefs citing The New Yorker

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